The Mycelium wallet for Android is a favorite among Bitcoiners. Users control their private keys and there are many advanced features, including support for hardware wallets and Tor.

If you’re a new Bitcoin user who’s ready to move your bitcoins away from centralized services like Coinbase, Mycelium is a great option for small amounts.

This article will teach you how to use some of Mycelium’s basic and advanced features.

How To Spend From Cold Storage

Paper wallets are a great way secure bitcoin funds, and Mycelium makes it easy to spend cold storage funds.

From the “Balance” tab, tap the camera icon.

Now scan any private key QR code and spend.

How to Import an HD Public Key

Why would you want to import an HD public key to Mycelium? It can help you track the balance of other Bitcoin wallets.

Let’s say you use Electrum on your computer and want to monitor your balance on your phone. Import the HD public key from Electrum into Mycelium.What’s great is that you can also import HD public keys from hardware wallets like TREZOR or Ledger. This makes monitoring or receiving payments to your cold storage balance easy.

To add an HD account, navigate to the “Accounts” tab. From there, tap the key icon in the top right corner.

Scroll to the bottom and tap “Advanced”.

Now tap “Scan” and scan the HD public key from any wallet. If successful, you should now see a new section under “Other Accounts” in the “Accounts Tab”.

Local Trader

Mycelium offers a somewhat low key feature that’s useful if you’re lucky enough to live near a city. Mycelium Local Trader helps match you with other Bitcoin buyers and sellers in your area. If you have people near you this makes it super easy to buy and sell Bitcoin with cash!

To activate the Local Trader feature, click the three dots in the top right corner of the wallet and then click “Settings”.

Scroll down and make sure that “Disable Local Trader” is unchecked.

You should now see the Local Trader option under the “Balance” tab.

Use Mycelium with Tor

Mycelium lets users route their traffic through Tor. At the time of writing it is the only mobile wallet for Android with this feature.

This is helpful because the Mycelium wallets pulls blockchain data from Mycelium’s (the company) central servers. While Mycelium claims it doesn’t log IP addresses or data, there’s no way to be sure. By using Orbot–the Android version of Tor–you can be certain that Mycelium has no access to your IP address.

From here you need to select “Use external tor (Orbot)” once again and it should configure your connection via Tor automatically.

Hardware Wallets

Mycelium is one of two Android wallets that supports hardware wallets TREZOR and Ledger. While you can’t setup a hardware wallet with Mycelium, it’s easy to use an already initialized TREZOR or Ledger with an OTG cable.

Other Settings

Mycelium users can customize a number of other options. One great feature is the ability to select multiple fiat currencies, and easily view your balance in terms of fiat throughout the wallet. The user can choose the exchange they wish to pull price data from. You can also select which block explorer will open automatically if you check a transaction on the blockchain.

A PIN code can also be set, which will be required each time Mycelium is opened or when sending a transaction.

Mycelium is considered one of the best Bitcoin wallets for Android. We hope Mycelium will add the ability to connect to a trusted node and move away from centralized validation.